Boris didn’t believe in omens. He was a man of science and of knowledge. Childish fears of the unknown were beneath him. But tonight, he’d felt a stirring in his gut that something was not right.
He wished he could have returned to his tent, opened a good book, and relaxed with some wine. Maybe vodka, if he was feeling like this. Vodka worked much more quickly than wine. In spite of the sweat trickling down his brow, he shivered.
Evan shifted beside him. The young college intern was from New York University, helping out with Boris’s dig to get a few extra credits for his course work in the Department of Anthropology. Evan was actually double majoring in anthropology and video game design, but he’d gotten behind in the anthropology classes while playing Warcraft, Halo 3, and The Sims.
Boris had never played any of the games, and he often tired of hearing the young man talk about them. In fact, Boris had politely suggested that Evan give up the anthropology degree and concentrate on the video games. Evan’s reply was that he needed the anthropology so he could build better games.
Tall and lanky, Evan still remained something of a couch potato. It was from all the sitting and playing games. In the camp, he charged his laptop and managed to play through the Internet with his gaming group. His fair hair and pale skin stood out in the darkness of the passageway.
They stood at an unexplored juncture of the cave. Three passageways spread out ahead of them.
Boris reached into the messenger bag he carried and took out a laminated piece of paper. It was a copy of a map he’d found in the trove he’d discovered in the original Herat dig only a few miles away. He’d found it with Lourds while cataloguing their find.
Lourds had been infatuated with Layla, and Boris hadn’t wanted to interfere with that budding relationship. That the woman would ultimately be attracted to Lourds was never an issue. In the years that he had been friends with the American, Boris had seen such things happen again and again. Lourds barely even noticed the women, really. They were just speed bumps in the path of his next discovery.
But Lourds had noticed this one.
Through the e-mails they sent back and forth, Boris had watched as the infatuation between the two lingered and finally built into something more. For the past few weeks, Lourds had talked about Layla a lot, and he’d seemed like he was dodging questions he was afraid to ask himself.
In fact, Boris had had his own troubles. Only a few days after the discovery in the original Herat dig, he had received a communiqué from Moscow letting him know his funding for the project had been rescinded. He didn’t have the money to fund his own research, and he was going to have to pay for his own way home.
That was when he’d come to love and appreciate Layla Taneen in his own way. Seeing how despondent he was, she had made a couple of phone calls, then presented him with new funding from the New York Natural History Museum to continue his work. Lourds had never known the original Russian funding had been rejected until it had already been replaced.
In Boris’s opinion, the woman was a godsend and a miracle worker. She’d even gotten a new position for herself four months ago. She was now in Kandahar, serving as a committee head for the International Monetary Fund that was dedicated to helping the people of Afghanistan find new ways to prosper at home and abroad.
Boris shined his flashlight over the map again. It had taken him months of searching geographical maps to find the mountains where he thought the site might be. The museum people had been satisfied with what he’d brought them so far, secured with Afghanistan’s blessings, but they were getting antsy.
Lourds had helped with the translation of the accompanying text, but it had been vague and uninformative to a degree. Whoever had ended up in the ossuary he and Lourds had discovered only a few miles away had also traveled here. That was what Boris believed. According to the text, the man had delivered a shipment to the caves and off-loaded it into the care of a foreigner. The writing was Old Persian, and Lourds hadn’t been able to date it with any accuracy. The papyrus it was written on was sitting in a lab, waiting to be carbon-dated.